


Tomorrow

by AcidKraken



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Age Difference, Asphyxiation, Choking, F/M, Heavy Angst, Infertility, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misogyny, No Aftercare, Not the cute kind, Pillow Talk, Post-Canon Lone Wanderer, Post-Coital, Recreational Drug Use, References to Depression, Rough Sex, Smoking, Ten Years Later, Under-negotiated Kink, pregnancy loss mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:15:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23408905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcidKraken/pseuds/AcidKraken
Summary: She remembered how life used to feel. Exalted highs, soul-rending lows. Grief, terror, triumph. Everything in between. Nothing lit that spark in her anymore - not scrapes with death, not chems, not grandiose gestures of heroism or her name on Three Dog's lips.But Jericho... Jericho was a cheap and dirty thrill she could still chase, if only one night at a time.(Content warning - see tags)
Relationships: Jericho & Lone Wanderer, Jericho/Female Lone Wanderer
Comments: 14
Kudos: 19
Collections: Fanfiction Writers United Angst Collection, Fanfiction Writers United Kink Collection





	Tomorrow

Another quick fuck, another night spent staring at his ceiling. Another night with the ache of fresh bruises blooming on her skin, and the sour curdle of regret in her stomach.

That feeling wasn’t new. She'd be the first to admit that visiting Jericho was a mistake - one she made time and time again, with the persistent hope that it'd be her last. It never was, of course. A few weeks, a few days, a few hours. It never took long for her to end up here, clammy and exhausted, her naked skin cold against his bare mattress. He was always one house away, after all, and a few drinks made the walk next door that much easier.

She ran her hand from her bare breast to her neck, fingertips ghosting over tender skin. Her throat still clenched where Jericho's rough hands had throttled her barely ten minutes prior. Ruptured blood vessels throbbed, mapping the shape his fingers took when he choked her to the brink of oblivion. Black and purple clung to the edges of her vision, and her legs still tingled from the endorphin rush that had come and gone - a weightless plummet so powerful that it almost chased away the pit in her stomach. 

Almost. 

She never managed to banish it completely. That hollow anguish inside her was normal, now, though it used to be hard to accept. She had every reason to be happy. She'd found so much fulfillment, even in a blighted world, but the thrill of big battles and the terrifying novelty of an open sky had worn off years ago. Faded, but not forgotten, like the moniker of _Hero_ that clung to her like Jericho's scent on her clothes. 

She remembered how life used to feel. Exalted highs, soul-rending lows. Grief, terror, triumph. Everything in between. Nothing lit that spark in her anymore - not scrapes with death, not chems, not grandiose gestures of heroism or her name on Three Dog's lips. But Jericho... Jericho was a cheap and dirty thrill she could still chase, if only one night at a time.

He sat on the far end of the bed. Far enough to leave her shivering as his sweat evaporated off of her body. His smell was the smell of jet, and old cigarettes, and sour whiskey tang, a miasma of spite and resignation she felt seeping into her bones the longer she spent here. The longer she spent with _him._

"Still alive over there?" 

She grimaced, then rolled onto her side, staring at a dark stain on the edge of the mattress. 

"What's it to you?" she asked, after a moment.

Her voice was hoarse, laced with venom, but Jericho didn't notice. He never did. He'd already pulled a jet canister from the crooked nightstand by the bed, and sucked at it until his expression turned glassy and distant. 

"Wouldn't be much of a gentleman if I didn't check," he said, with a shrug. "Right?" 

He cracked a yellow grin, and she gave him chilly silence in return.

"Christ," he said, scowling. "Lighten up. Here. Take a hit."

He waggled the canister at her. She sat up, then hissed, wincing at the sudden stiffness in her neck. 

"What's your problem?" he asked.

She frowned, massaging her nape with one hand and rubbing her face with the other. No point in answering, when he already knew damn well. He'd twisted her head back, yanked on her hair. Done everything she'd asked him to do, and more. 

Much more. Too much. It was _always_ too much, but that was the point.

She still felt the telltale sting in her eyes, still shook with the occasional rattling breath. Like always, their encounters left her close to tears, but that was old news. She searched for that precipice, challenged herself to turn the other cheek and endure a little more. A little harder. And she never permitted those shaky exhales to turn into sobs.

Not that it would have stopped him. Tears weren't a dealbreaker for men like him. The way he looked at her now was proof enough - he squinted at her with steely eyes, as she propped herself against his rusted bed frame. And even as she rolled her neck, her teeth bared in pain, his expression stayed still as stone. He kept his hand outstretched, nudging the jet at her like it was a scrap of meat. As if these few vague seconds of kindness were a waste of precious time. 

"Cmon," he growled. "Take it, or don't. I ain't got all fuckin’ night."

"Fine, fine," she said. "Fuck."

She reached for it, wincing at the pull of her knotted muscles, and put it to her lips. Jericho sighed and leaned back, lighting a cigarette and burning through it with a kind of hunger that told her he rarely went more than twenty minutes without one. 

Twenty minutes. 

About how long he'd fucked her, hard and rough and selfishly, before finishing inside her and retreating to the edge of the bed.

She scowled, compressed the inhaler, and took a breath. The ammonia ripped down her airway, filling her lungs with fire before seeping back out to settle between her teeth. She’d taste it for days - that’s what she hated about jet. In fact, she’d hated _everything_ about jet, before Jericho. Never understood why anyone would pay an arm and a leg to blister their throats with brahmin shit. But she couldn’t hold on to this post-coital torpor on her own, and the jet captured the numb relief that would otherwise be here and gone in an instant. 

“Here,” Jericho said. His voice was slow, distorted, warped. “You’re making a goddamn mess.”

He chucked a rag at her, the faded remains of an old bandana. She grasped lazily at it and tucked it under her ass. Cold cum already leaked out of her, dripping down the inside of her thigh. The sensation made her skin crawl. But just like the soreness of her muscles and the muted indifference sinking into her bones, that revulsion was a feeling she’d learned to welcome. 

The first time she told him he could do it, he’d looked at her with suspicion. There was the usual worry, the what-ifs. But his hesitation quickly gave way to self-indulgence, as it often did. Fortunately for him, he had nothing to worry about. Ten years of exposure had left her sterile. Nuke mines and spilled waste and the countless nights spent cleaning her open wounds with tainted water - she couldn't withstand any of it. Not like the scores of hardy wastelanders who’d wrung that weakness out of their bodies.

Jericho doubted her certainty. Of course he did, but she knew. She knew for certain, because she'd tried with a nice boy she met in Rivet City. That was long after the Enclave's fall, but not so long that she wasn't desperate to fill the vacuum of heroic purpose with something else. With a family, with something she'd been longing for since her father perished behind thick panes of ballistic glass. She thought being barren wouldn't matter, in the end. She thought she loved that boy regardless. And maybe she did, but love couldn’t stop the bitterness of failure from corroding what they'd shared to nothing.

She never explained that to Jericho. He didn't care about those kinds of things, anyway. 

"You're one freaky bitch," he muttered. "You know that?"

His voice yanked her out of the past. She looked at him, and he settled against the wall, sizing her up with the same sort of appreciation she'd seen traders give to a nice piece of scrap.

"Mm," she grunted. "You think so?"

"I _know_ so."

He chuckled to himself. She pressed her lips together, then sat up, pulling up the underwear that sat wadded up around her ankle.

"You have a good time?" he asked.

She suppressed a scoff. Jericho rarely concerned himself with her pleasure, but she never raised the issue. The satisfaction she got from these encounters was one of morbid annihilation, the odd quiet calm she felt after he was done with her. 

“Well?” he asked. 

She shrugged. He wrinkled his nose at her and sniffed. 

"Whatever. Sure sounded like it, anyway. "

A grimace, this time, one she couldn’t suppress. True, her throat was mangled from screaming his name. From begging for more, begging for it harder, begging past the point where she should have told him to stop. Pleading for obliteration, for the moment he pushed her so far she slipped out of the present and into a tranquil, desolate space within herself. 

He gave her what she wanted. But she didn't enjoy it. She knew sex - good sex, gentle sex. The kind of sex that made her come.

This wasn't that. It wasn't supposed to be.

She had a singular, grim purpose in coming here. Some vain flicker of hope brought her back to him, a wretched siren song that promised her that these encounters could scrub the past away. And they had, in some ways. The longer she tangled her limbs with his, the longer she stared at his mangled skin, the harder it was to distinguish his scars from hers. Bullet holes, knife marks, thick keloids and bits of healed-over shrapnel - they chronicled his misdeeds. Her heroics. Both mapped out lives that had left them adrift, without meaning, until all they had to hold onto was the bland and blurry passage of time. 

Jericho sat up, ashed his cigarette, and grabbed his sweat-stained t-shirt from where it dangled on the corner of the bed frame. His sinewy muscles stretched tight, like bundles of frayed rope that threatened to snap at any moment. 

"Wanna hit the bar?" he asked.

He leaned down, yanked his boots on, and looked up at her. She shook her head.

"Can't."

"The fuck not?"

"Caravan'll make a pass soon. Any day now."

"So?"

"I’ve still got a sentrybot torso to strip down. And mountains of other shit to sort through."

"Fuck that." He rose to his feet, grabbed the olive-colored tangle of her coveralls on the floor, and chucked them at her. "Come on, let's go."

He stalked across the room, towards the rifle rack by the door. She watched him every step of the way. Something cold wriggled in her stomach, when he took the weapon and threw it across his back. An old anxiety, one that shuddered to life every now and again when Jericho tried to have his way.

"Not tonight," she said.

"Bullshit. Put some fucking clothes on."

_"I said no, Jericho."_

Her words ricocheted off the metal interior of Jericho’s shack, piercing and harsh. It was a voice she so rarely used nowadays - the same voice that, when coupled with a big gun and a tall posture, earned a young vault dweller the respect of strangers from Rivet City to Oasis and everywhere in between. Now, Jericho was the only one who ever heard it. 

She wondered, sometimes, if he recognized that side of her from years past. If he did, he never let it show. He just narrowed his eyes and stared at her. She stared back, swallowing down the tenderness in her raw throat.

"Fine," he muttered. "Suit yourself."

He spit on the floor, then paced towards the armchair in the corner of the room. She pulled on her coveralls, inch by inch, and watched him. He didn’t sit. He just lingered on his feet, leering straight ahead, burning holes into the wall. She could see his frustration boiling - in the clenching and unclenching of his jaw, in the straining tendons of his neck. But he didn't let it out, not like he used to.

He was docile, now - at least, for tonight. She'd done Megaton a service, in a twisted sort of way. In her, he found a conduit for his worst impulses. There was a feral streak in him, a pent-up animal rage he often unleashed at Gob, at unsuspecting drifters and anyone who looked at him sideways. Now, it found more and more purchase behind closed doors. With her. 

She fixated on him as he reached down, fished a half-smoked cigarette from the overflowing ashtray on the end table, and lit it. His hands were knotted with scars, fingernails split and warped, his knuckles gnarled and white. She made a point not to think about it - still, it was hard not to imagine what kind of galling sins those hands had committed. Night after night, he choked her until her vision faded, until the room tilted under her naked body and her lungs burned for air. She saw flashes of regret on his face, sometimes - the same tension that pinched between his brows when he drank alone. 

She knew what that meant. 

Whether he found it in her, or at the bottom of a bottle, the end result was one and the same. He needed an outlet, a dumping ground for a past that clung to him like burrs on the hem of a jacket. 

She knew, because she needed it too. 

“The fuck are you gawking at?”

She went stiff. Jericho flicked his cigarette at her and glowered, snarl deepening the longer she kept silent. 

“Nothing,” she murmured. “Chill.”

She turned away, shoulders tense, and picked her way across the room. Bottles, old laundry, empty ammo boxes and jet canisters carpeted the place like sawdust lining the floor of a cantina. Jericho watched her, gaze burrowing into the base of her skull, and when her fingertips reached the rusted edge of the door handle, he jabbed a finger in her direction.

“Don't let that fucking fleabag in here," he warned.

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” 

With a wrench of the handle, the door cracked open, spilling a sliver of sallow lamplight into the room. Dogmeat shoved his head past the threshold, greeting her with bloodshot eyes and a nudge of his greyed muzzle. His tail thumped hard against the aluminum flushing on the doorframe, as she nudged him back with her foot and stepped out into the cold.

"See you tomorrow, then,” Jericho said.

She hesitated in the doorway, guts tightening. She’d barely heard him say it, the gravelly tone of his voice lost in the hum of live wires and the buzz of string lights outside. But it hit her all the same. It felt as if he’d sentenced her to it, as if his words alone - rather than her own horrid compulsions - were what dragged her along, night after night, and kept her coming back to him long after she knew she should stop.

Jericho liked to say Megaton was a black hole, that no day spent here was any different than the one that came before. She was young, when she first heard him say it, and she curled her lip in response. She was fresh-faced and starry-eyed, untainted by the world above, and his cynicism was poison. 

It only took a decade before that poison finally sank in.

She hesitated a moment longer, her fingers looped around Dogmeat’s collar to keep him at bay. Then, she stepped onto the well-packed dirt outside. She dragged the door shut behind her, then let her companion go, watching him limp along the path to her home.

"Tomorrow," she said, weakly. "Yeah."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. I've sat on this work for almost six months now, debating whether or not to post it. This level of unbridled angst is not my cup of tea, usually, so it was a bit nerve-wracking to write and even more so to share with the world. 
> 
> As always, I'm open to constructive feedback, and please let me know if I overlooked a potential flag or trigger. I'll be happy to add it to my tags.


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